The Great Gun Control Debate

[zipperhead_cop]

Here's some good gun control in action:

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/us_gun_drawing_suspension
New Jersey 2nd-grader suspended from school for drawing stick figure with gun

By The Associated Press

DENNIS TOWNSHIP, N.J. - A second-grader's drawing of a stick figure shooting a gun earned him a one-day school suspension.

Kyle Walker, 7, was suspended last week for violating Dennis Township Primary School's zero-tolerance policy on guns, the boy's mother, Shirley McDevitt, told The Press of Atlantic City.

Kyle gave the picture to another child on the school bus, and that child's parents complained about it to school officials, McDevitt said. Her son told her the drawing was of a water gun, she said.

A photocopy of the picture provided by McDevitt showed two stick figures with one pointing a crude-looking gun at the other, the newspaper said. What appeared to be the word "me" was written above the shooter, with another name scribbled above the other figure.

School officials declined to comment Friday. A message left at the superintendent's office Saturday was not returned.

Kyle drew other pictures, including a skateboarder, King Tut, a ghost, a tree and a Cyclops, the newspaper reported.

Clearly, this child was on the brink of a killing spree.  Such violent imagery is inticitive of a mind gone feral. 

 

[TCBF]

- Clearly, operant conditioning in the form of graphic videogames is the culprit here.

8)

 

[Varps]

Gun laws really stopped the terrorists in 9/11.

Evil will always find a tool to destroy with.
An evil man can kill with a hammer whilist a good man can build a shelter for the homeless. Target the evil man and not the tool.

I agree. Very well put.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I have stayed away from this debate for quite some time, but this article, reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions (§29) of the Copyright Act from today’s Ottawa Citizen, got me thinking:

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/opinion/story.html?id=32db6246-f33c-4043-a6f3-d6c16eb18512

A nation of licence holders

Pierre Lemieux
Citizen Special

Monday, December 17, 2007

After his four-week criminal trial ended this month in Kenora, Ont., Bruce Montague was found guilty of several paper crimes for activities that were totally legal a few decades ago and, often, only a dozen years ago. His wife Donna was also convicted of possession of a firearm without a licence.

Sentencing, which could send the Montagues to jail for many years, is scheduled for March 17.

Bruce Montague was involved in the civil disobedience movement launched in 2002 by the Canadian Unregistered Firearms Owners Association (CUFOA). These Canadian heroes have openly refused to obey the firearm registration and licensing requirements put in the Criminal Code in 1995. The Montagues are the first of CUFOA's core group to fall.

At a time in western history when people entertained a healthy mistrust toward the state, the legal principle developed that somebody could not be charged twice for the same crime. Otherwise, the state, with its virtually limitless resources, could simply bring an accused to trial as often as necessary until he was convicted. The trick now used to circumvent this old rule of law is to file so many charges that one is bound to stick with the jury. The state threw more than 50 charges at Mr. Montague. Several stuck.

Of course, with the liberticidal laws governing us, pulling a large number of charges is never difficult, even for bureaucrats.

Bruce Montague is a good, honest, simple man. He is persuaded that he is right and that, therefore, he must win under the law. He is the sort of man Henry David Thoreau was talking about in his On the Duty of Civil Disobedience: those "heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men," who "serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part." Bruce's wife, Donna, shares this honour, too.

The police found Bruce's guns in a hidden room in the family house. The state prosecutor (I won't say "Crown prosecutor," in order not to sully the Crown), who would obviously do anything to earn a living, is quoted as saying, in his closing argument, "It's not normal to build secret rooms." This deep reflection reminded me of the Nazis' 1938 ban against attic storage which Professor Robert Proctor mentions in his book, The Nazi War on Cancer. It is not normal to hide things from the state.

The way things are going, we will end up in a society like the Village in Patrick McGoohan's famous TV series The Prisoner (now available in DVD): everybody doing only normal things, being nice and cheerful, playing obediently any game imposed by the authorities, and with nothing to hide.

We will be a nation of licence holders. A typical charge against Bruce Montague read, "And further that William Bruce Montague on or about the 11th day of September 2004 at the Township of Rugby in the said Region did possess firearms without being the holder of a licence under which he may possess them contrary to Section 91(1) of the Criminal Code."

Fortunately, the jury did not retain the charges claiming "a purpose dangerous to the public peace," which would likely have kept Bruce in jail until his sentencing. The Montagues will appeal their convictions, and be able to pursue the constitutional challenge that the judge threw out before their criminal trial began (see www.brucemontague.ca).

In the meantime, Bruce's lifestyle has been destroyed. This is the state in all its glory: crushing some individuals in order to please others.

I fear that the Montagues won't be the last Canadians to be persecuted for defending our traditional liberties. But civil disobedience may be the only way to reclaim them, and I hereby propose Bruce and Donna Montague for the Order of Canada.

Pierre Lemieux is an economist in the Department of Management Sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais.

E-mail: pierre.lemieux@uqo.ca

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007​

My position is that it is reasonable to equate firearms with cars. We, the public, have made a privacy/safety compromise: we require those who want to use motor vehicles on public roads to demonstrate a certain level of skill and knowledge. We have also made a compromise on reasonable requirements including e.g. that one must be 16 years old, etc. We also made another reasonable compromise and decided that road users must pay some of the costs for using public roads and we used a motor vehicle license system to ensure these taxes or fees were paid. A third accommodation related to financial responsibility: because motor vehicle accidents often have severe financial (personal injury and property damage) consequences we, broadly, require that vehicle owners carry insurance. Not many people disagree, in principle, with the motor vehicle and driver licensing, registration and insurance system.

I believe that similar (not exact), in principle, compromises are applicable to firearms used in the public spaces. (In other words if you never take your rifle off your own farm then no one, including the Queen and all her minions, has any business with you and your rifle - so long as you don’t shoot onto your neighbours’ properties or the public spaces.) Thus, I’m not unalterably opposed to firearms licences and registration, etc, so long as the system conforms to our other broad standards.

I am more concerned about the legal “overload” system to which M. Lemieux refers. It is fundamentally wrong for prosecutors to lay five or ten charges when one will do. If they cannot prove one serious charge then, most likely, no serious offence has been committed; if they really believe an offence has been committed then they need to lay a charge, one charge, on which they believe a jury will convict. These prosecutors are abusing the principles of the system of laws that underlies liberal democracy.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

The article also neglects to mention that the State seized his house as a "proceeds of crimes" even though they had not found him guilty at the time. This was to prevent him from using it to fund a legal challenge.

 

[Loachman]

I have contributed well over a thousand dollars to Bruce's legal battle to date, and will continue to do so. He intends to take this to the Supreme Court. So much of the legislation violates the Charter of rights and Freedoms that it deserves to fail. It is far more, and far more offensive, than a simple horrendously expensive and useless registry.

The so-called "secret room" was simply his security vault and nothing more.

 

[Kirkhill]

Flabbergasted....

Right to property
Right to use of property
Home and Castle

Instead, it seems, I live in country of the Tsar's secret police, Lenin's commisars and Robespierre's "citoyens".

Interestingly I came across this article on RealClearPolitics, an American site, by David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen:

December 17, 2007
Then They Came for Mark Steyn...

...These days in Canada, if you're feeling down and blue, and you think somebody hates you, you bring your case to a Human Rights Tribunal. And the people you think hate you get that knock on the door,... (and) dragged before a committee of smug, leftwing, humourless, jargon-blathering adjudicators. After long delays that are costly only to the defendant and the taxpayer (and justice delayed is justice denied), you will have the satisfaction of making your enemy squirm, in a kangaroo court where he is stripped of the right to due process, in which there are no fixed rules of evidence, in which the ridiculously biased “judges” make up the law as they go along, and impose penalties restricted only by their grimly limited imaginations -- such as ruinous fines, and lifetime "cease and desist" orders, such that, if you ever open your mouth again on a given topic, you stand to go to prison.....
Alan Borovoy, one of the pioneers of these star chambers in Canada, now expresses himself aghast at their powers, and how they are being used to bring an end to Canada's heritage of free speech and free press. As he wrote in the Calgary Herald, recently: "During the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create [these] commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech."

Against him, it must be said that he and his colleagues simply weren't listening when I and mine explained, decades ago, why this would be their inevitable effect. ...

Alan Borovoy apparently felt himself to be part of put upon underclass that needed to fetter the overclass.....now he finds himself seen as part of the overclass with other poor souls perceiving him as part of the overclass and wishing to fetter him....

John Stuart Mill must consider it a pretty hard bargain that his fellow liberal's in Canada made to gain power.  Funny that his fellow reformer, Radical Jack aka Lord Durham, is also demonized in this country.

 

[Edward Campbell]

...

John Stuart Mill must consider it a pretty hard bargain that his fellow liberal's in Canada made to gain power.  Funny that his fellow reformer, Radical Jack aka Lord Durham, is also demonized in this country.

Isn't that the truth? We have about 75 years of policy vandalism to put right, somehow, sometime.

I blame the Scots for this, Kirkhill!    It must be them (and their allies, the ancient enemy: the French) because we Canadians are the most conservative of England's "daughters" and we are, at the same time, the least English and least liberal of the great liberal democracies. This may be because real, classical liberalism remains anathema in France and never really took a firm hold in Scotland, either.* In the 18th and 19th centuries the French and then the Scots were much more influential (in Canada) than the English and the other real liberals (the Scandinavians) arrived too late and in too few numbers. We put too much faith in the state and too little in the individual and capitalism (something else the Scots invented but failed to implement – rather like Canadians and basketball) starting from 1879. This French political heresy called statism reached an absolute popular† crescendo under King in the dirty thirties and then, to everyone’s absolute amazement, was brought back into high favour in the ‘60s and ‘70s by Mike Pearson and Pierre Trudeau – the former should have known better, he had a good, solid English liberal education.

Anyhow: you’re right; Canadians’ liberty, basic freedom and ancient rights are being carted away by the agents of stupid, venal, ward heeling politicians – just the sort of ‘leaders’ a small, mean, greedy and envious population deserves.


----------
* The Enlightenment, which began in Scotland and spread to France from that poor wee nation, did not lead to liberalism. In fact liberalism (with its roots in places like England and Iceland) predates the enlightenment by, at my guess, nearly 1,000 years. All liberal people had their own enlightenments; relatively few enlightened peoples became liberal.

† Popular almost always equals conservative

 

[Edward Campbell]

I have contributed well over a thousand dollars to Bruce's legal battle to date, and will continue to do so. He intends to take this to the Supreme Court. So much of the legislation violates the Charter of rights and Freedoms that it deserves to fail. It is far more, and far more offensive, than a simple horrendously expensive and useless registry.

The so-called "secret room" was simply his security vault and nothing more.

Good for you.

And for those who also want to help fight this miscarriage of justice: http://www.brucemontague.ca/html/0006.html#donate

 

[Kirkhill]

I blame the Scots for this, Kirkhill!   

Whuch yins.  The Tcheuchters or the Sassenachs?  ;D  Mah fowks hae been guid covenanters and Hanoverians for centuries wi' naething at a' tae dae wi' they Jacobite spawn o' the Guise clan.  Ayr's Grey Breeks, raised by the Earl of Mar, stood against the Jacobites at Culloden as the Royal North British Fuzileers.

Kidding aside though you are dead right.  The Scots are as blameworthy as any and moreso than most.

The issue though is not one of policy and rational debate of ideals it is of ancient totems and loyalties and irrational, emotional bonds.  While Hutcheson, Kames, Hume and Smith could find common cause with Burke, Locke and Newton they could never turn the Stewarts and the Highlanders from their affections that tied them to the Catholic Irish, the Gallican French of the Guise and the parvenu Bourbons of Pamplona.

In Canada you find the Liberal party dominated by Cape Breton and PEI Highlanders, Quebec and Ontario Irishmen and, of course, the French, all joined through their Catholicism.  The Protestant side is represented in the Conservative party by the Episcopalians (top downers like the Catholics including the Anglicans and the Lutherans) and the Presbyterians (grass roots organizers with sympathizers amongst the Dutch Reformers, Low German Palatines and Huguenots of Switzerland, Savoy, Auvergne, the Vendee, Britanny, Normandie and la Rochelle).

Unfortunately the Protestants morphed into atheistic socialist, communists and anarchists "proving" the old aristocrats and papists right all along.

There you find your cultural determinism here in Canada.

Interestingly there was a map in "The Times Concise Atlas of World History" 1982 titled "The Emancipation of the Peasantry".  While most of Eurasian peasantry was subject to feudalism until the 19th century with the great emancipations happening between 1789 (French Revolution) and the 1870's (Alexander's Russian reforms) the United Kingdom (unwisely treated as an entity), the Netherlands and Flanders are noted as having been "freed early during the transition from labour services to payment of money rents".    By contrast Friesland, Norway, Sweden and Finland, together with Sweden's co-Swabians in Switzerland, are noted as areas of "Free Settlement" ie never subject to feudalism.

I believe that Britain (the geographical Britain) along with the Netherlands and Flanders (the traditional cockpit of Europe) represents the battleground between the "Freemen" of the Northern Seas and the Mediterranean Feudalists. 

Policy and ideals matter less than totems and totems matter less than culture, the language and tales that you learn from your kin.

----------------------------------------------------------------

1678.09.23 Earl of Mar's Regiment of Foot
also known until 1751 by the names of twelve other colonels
1685 Scots Fuzileers
1688.03.01 placed on English Establishment; ranked as 21st Foot
1707 North British Fuzileers
1713 Royal North British Fuzileers
1751.07.01 21st Regiment of Foot (Royal North British Fuzileers)
1877.04.03 21st (Royal Scots Fusiliers) Regiment of Foot 
1881.07.01 The Royal Scots Fusiliers
reorganised as the county regiment of Ayrshire, Dumfries-shire, Kircudbrightshire Wigtownshire, Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire, encompassing also its Militia and infantry volunteers [see below] 
1887.05.01 Dumfries-shire, Roxburghshire and Selkirkshire recruiting area transferred to The King's Own Scottish Borderers
1899 Kirkcudbright and Wigtown recruiting area transferred to The King's Own Scottish Borderers
1959.01.20 amalgamated with The Highland Light Infantry (City of Glasgow Regiment), to form
The Royal Highland Fusiliers (Princess Margaret's Own Glasgow and Ayrshire Regiment)

PS Mar's Grey Breeks are now The Royal Highland Fusiliers, 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland.

 

[Kirkhill]

More on cultural determinism, alliances, Scots, religion and Canadian politics......

From a series of articles in the Telegraph by a Scot, Alan Cochrane (guid lowland name) working in England as a Brit.
This extract is from an article on Glasgow, the Irish side of Scotland and home of Frances Hutcheson (greatest good for the greatest number), Clydeside unionism and Scottish communism.  Edinburgh is on the Fries side of Scotland and home of Lord Kames (laws exist to protect property) and was functionally first a fort, then a market, then a centre of the covenanting theocracy, then home of the enlightenment.  Glasgow went from monastery to shipyard in one easy lesson when the Scots started selling tobacco.  Prior to that Ayr had been the principle "Scottish" port on the Irish Sea.

...Mark Welsh, 30, and Mark Duguid, 19, work in the Celtic Shop. They both say they think the United Kingdom is biased in favour of England and that they would vote for independence as soon as possible. "Without any hesitation I would say I was Scottish and I wouldn't say I was British," said Mr Welsh. "England is just so arrogant and they don't respect Scotland."

"I know," says Mr Duguid, peering out from under his spiky, gelled hair. "On X-Factor they always say, 'people all over England are watching the show tonight', as if Scotland didnae exist."

I asked them if they thought Scotland was still drawn along sectarian lines and they immediately agreed. "Protestants up here are all for Queen and Country," said Mr Welsh, "but Catholics in Scotland hate all that. When Rangers fans pass this window they just grog [spit] on it, and the other day a guy came in asking for a Celtic strip with a Union Jack on it. He was just causing trouble. He knew we wouldny have that."

"And who," I asked, "would you support in an international fixture between England and Ireland?"

"Ireland," they said in unison. Mr Welsh smiled as if the answer was obvious. "I feel much closer to Ireland and somewhere back in my past we were Irish. I just couldny stand it for England to win."...

 

[Kirkhill]

PS sorry for the hijack, perhaps this should be relegated to "Ted and Chris's Determinist Debate".

 

[Jacqueline]

Last night, three guys tried to break into my house. I have vicious dogs so I'm safe, but if they had guns, I'd be scared. I'd feel safer with some kind of pistol, however I don't really want  a gun around.

 

[muffin]

You'd have to keep it so locked up you'd never get to it in time in that situation. I have guns here and by the time i got them unlocked and loaded... they'd have me for sure.

 

[Jacqueline]

Well, I'd carry it in my purse...... unless that's against a law.

 

[gaspasser]

Last night, three guys tried to break into my house. I have vicious dogs so I'm safe, but if they had guns, I'd be scared. I'd feel safer with some kind of pistol, however I don't really want  a gun around.

MissJ, Sorry to hear that you had some problems last night, and I hope you are all right and nothing is amiss..but muffin is right, the Cdn law has good people's hands tied when it comes to PROPERLY using handguns and whatnot.  Our gun control laws never seemed to work and the americans are going to try for it and probably find the same answer we did...IF you outlaw guns, only Outlaws will have Guns. I firmly believe that guns don't kill people, etc...
BUT I do beleive that we all should be able to defend ourselves and family against idiots and misgreants who try to harm us or violate us.  :mg: In an utopian world we wouldn't need weapons... {wishful thinking voice} 
My $0.02 worth...BYTD
remember...for this, we fight!

 

[FullMetalParka]

Well, I'd carry it in my purse...... unless that's against a law.

In the U.S., they have laws that allow citizens to carry a concealed weapon for their safety if they pass a training course. In Canada, they have a smiliar license to carry a weapon, but it is NEVER issued to "common folk."

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Your guns don't have to be locked up when you are present, in it's registered address (ie: your home). There are a million reasons why you had it handy. Cleaning, admiring, working on it, training with it, etc. Just a few that come to mind. Loaded magazines are allowed under the storage laws.

We have a huge thread running on this stuff. Let's try to keep the debate and comments in that thread please. http://forums.army.ca/forums/threads/28692.0.html

Just vote your conscience. We know it's ABC and a US poll, but if they lose their second amendment rights, it'll domino through the whole worldwide firearms community.

 

[muffin]

True they don't have to be locked up here - but I have two young kids... so they always are

 

[Mike Baker]

Well, I am all for guns and such, but they do get into the wrong hands. Now, if there were better ways for people to buy a weapon i.e. better background checks and such, then things would not be as bad. Also, it should be mandatory for everyone who purchases a firearm to take a course to learn how to store weapons safe, so no one can get their hands on them if need be.

Now, with regard of having a pistol for self defence, there are gun cases that use fingerprint locks, which can be accessed fast, and only you can access the contents. But, I do believe that we as law biding citizens do/should have the right to defend ones self and their family with deadly force, if needed, no questions asked.

Now ask yourself, would you rather have your house vandalized, and be unable to stop it, or have a firearm, and know how to use it properly to defend yourself and your assets? I sure as hell do.

But I guess people don't see it that way, as my young conservative mind does.